1. Field
Example embodiments relate to machine translation technologies for generating a translation of a source sentence using a computer.
2. Description of the Background
With the recent increasing exchange of communication between nations, and development and expansion of an information technology (IT), the use of machine translation apparatuses for translating a sentence of a first language (e.g., a source language) to a sentence of a second language (e.g., a target language) is increasing. Generally, the machine translation apparatuses translate an input source sentence of one language to a sentence of another language through operations, which includes such as a morpheme analysis, a syntactic analysis, a conversion operation, and/or a generation operation, with respect to the input source sentence.
Machine translation methods according to the related art may include, for example, a direct method, a transfer method, and a pivot method based on an analysis level of a sentence. The direct method translates a sentence based on a direct correspondence between a source language and a target language, the transfer method translates a sentence through an operation of defining two intermediate expressions and performing an analysis, a conversion, and a generation operation with respect to each of the source language and the target language, and the pivot method translates a sentence through an analysis operation and a generation operation by defining a single neutral expression with respect to the source language and the target language.
Meanwhile, machine translation methods developed during the 1990s include, for example, a rule-based machine translation, a statistics-based machine translation, and a hybrid machine translation in which the rule-based machine translation and the statistics-based machine translation are combined. The machine translation methods may perform a translation based on knowledge or translation examples obtained from a previous translation process or statistics.
For example, Korean Laid-Open Publication No. 10-2010-0037813, published on Apr. 12, 2010, discloses a machine translation apparatus and method based on a statistical method that applies linguistic information to a statistical machine translation based on an analysis about a bilingual parallel corpus.
FIG. 1 illustrates an example of a probabilistic machine translation candidate according to a related art. Referring to FIG. 1, a probabilistic machine translation according to the related art generates a translation by measuring scores based on a word/sentence/rule of a translation candidate with respect to a source sentence, by combining corresponding candidates, and by sorting total scores of a sentence.
FIG. 2 illustrates an example of finding a correct path of translating a source sentence in German to a target sentence in English according to a related art. Referring to FIG. 2, corresponding candidates may be sorted and then displayed in descending order of probabilities.
As described above, the machine translation technology according to the related art generally considers information only regarding whether a translation of a source sentence is correct.